Doctor puts Farage in his place by putting his cancer survival to work for the NHS
UKIP leader Nigel Farage berates the NHS for his late testicular cancer diagnosis. National Health Action Party candidate Dr John Lamport has put his survival from the same cancer to good use; becoming a doctor and now fighting to save the NHS that saved his life. This is his letter:
"Nigel Farage was treated for cancer in 1987, a time when the NHS was reeling from Thatcher's savage budget cuts. I was treated for the same disease in 2005 and my experience was very different. I went from GP to operating theatre in less than four days.
Unlike Nigel, I was a child of 16 and my cancer had spread so I had painful chemotherapy for 9 months.
It is clear that Nigel's experience shaped his views about the NHS, making him think private is best and immigrants are incompetent.
Testicles are complicated things. They can twist. Nigel describes being investigated for a twisted testicle first - entirely appropriate as this is a surgical emergency and you can lose a testicle in hours. He then criticises an Indian specialist who correctly identified that his testicle wasn't twisted.
I don't have all the information but a painful swollen testicle fits at least four conditions better than cancer. I wouldn't have ordered a scan either. I would have been wrong, but hindsight makes us all experts.
Nigel, your consultant claimed blood tests are more "cruel" than chemotherapy for testicular cancer. I had that chemo. Let me tell you what you missed. 9 months of vomiting, feeling sick as a dog, constant mouth/throat ulcers (made worse when they keep getting soaked in stomach acid), losing 4 stone in weight and skin rashes. I can't feel my hands and feet, my lungs are scarred up, kidney function has dropped off, immune system is now a joke and my heart has suffered. I didn't even notice my hair falling out. As for fertility, you have four children. Count yourself lucky.
You whinge because you had regular blood-tests. I don't complain, because chemo saved my life.
This isn't intended as a sob story. The friends I made on the ward, all lads younger than Nigel was, all passed away. Painfully. We are the lucky ones Nigel!
Nigel says he gets angry at having had cancer. I get angry when politicians posture to justify cutting the NHS back.
As a medic and junior doctor, I've experienced 15 hospitals and countless wards, and what I've witnessed is doctors and nurses working tirelessly in the face of cuts and red tape and under-staffing to give their patients the best care they can. As a doctor, I never left work until at least an hour (sometimes five hours) after my shift finished, none of us did.
The NHS isn't unaffordable, it's under-funded. The UK spends the least of all G7 nations on healthcare as a proportion of GDP.
The NHS's problems are underfunding and reckless, expensive privatisation. Privatisation wastes billions of pounds because it relies on the creation of a competitive market for the buying and selling of health services, resulting in huge administrative and legal costs. Money ends up in the pockets of lawyersand accountants, not to mention shareholders, rather than being spent on patient care. Private companies are less accountable, they poach staff trained by the NHS and cherry-pick the most profitable services leaving NHS with the costly complex ones.
The answer to this is to raise the funding to the European average and reverse privatisation. However, the four main parties are pushing cuts and privatisation as the answer. UKIP is a part of that four-party privatisation phalanx assaulting the NHS. Nigel Farage’s personal views couldn't be clearer. He was caught on film saying, “I think we're going to have to move to an insurance-based system of healthcare.”
Unlike Nigel's story, mine is not all about me. I cannot describe the guilt of surviving when your friends die, but it is a motivating force. It motivated me to use my borrowed time to become a doctor for the NHS and to fight for it politically as part of the National Health Action Party. We are getting stronger as more of us find a voice - and unlike your cancer and mine, we won't be going away Nigel."
